5 Steps to Cutting Costs Through Open Source: DIY Drones - Huffington Post

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5 Steps to Cutting Costs Through Open Source: DIY Drones
Huffington Post
The military-grade UAV purchased by the Defense Department cost it between $300,000 to $400,000 for the full system. Chris's company ended up building what's known as a Quadcopter, similar to a Raven in overall capabilities, that costs about $300, ...


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[Mike]

This is a very interesting mainstream article that talks about quadcopters. I do IT for a government agency in the USA and if you ask for a $50,000 piece of software, they don't hesitate, but if you offer up an open source solution that does the same thing and has a huge community backing it, they question it and oftentimes don't let it happen. They can never give a good reason either. They are moving applications to the web to become platform independent, but all the apps they're building are Microsoft Sharepoint based and are only usable with IE. The mentality is extremely backwards, but once us younger guys are fully in charge, I think it will turn around. Then the government will stop spending $100k on a drone they can get for a few grand.

Man, I love technology!